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Picking up from last year’s midseason finale, Hank rises from the toilet with a newfound and panic-stricken realization that Walt is indeed the Heisenberg he’s been hunting all this time. After making an excuse, hightailing it with Marie and having a fairly significant panic attack on the ride home, Hank re-opens the investigation in his own garage, and the sheer scope of the entire Heisenberg operation is fairly staggering.
Meanwhile, Walt tries to persuade Skyler to agree to expand their car-wash empire in order to better launder their giant brick o’ cash. Of course, as anyone could have predicted, extricating himself from Madrigal’s lucrative Czech-centric meth operation is not proving to be the cleanest of breaks. Lydia Rodart-Quayle, reigning Miss America and Joe’s Favorite Human, shows up at the car wash to bitch to Walt about plummeting purity standards in the meth (possibly because Todd the kid-killing fuckup is the new cook? I’m guessing). She wants Walt to come back for a week’s tutorial, but he turns her down, and when he tells Skyler that the jittery woman getting her rental car washed is an old business associate, Skyler makes it even plainer: never come back.
Jesse, for like the third time in six season premieres, is in a bad way, reeling from his guilt over the death of the dirt bike kid and the (probable) death of Mike at (most likely) Walt’s hand. After trying to get Saul to disburse his share of the meth money to Kaylee Ehrmantraut and the parents of Dirtbike Boy, Saul calls up Walt, who shows up at Jesse’s house to try to talk him out of giving everything away. He also makes a remarkably convincing case that Mike is perfectly alive and on the run somewhere. Jesse says he believes him and agrees to keep the money, but his face tells a different story. Indeed, by episode’s end, Jesse is driving through the impoverished neighborhoods of Albuquerque, tossing stacks of cash onto lawns like they’re copies of the morning news.
Finally, Walt discovers a tracking device on his car and, the day, pays Hank a visit. Hank can barely speak to Walt, he’s shaking so much with a combination of fear and rage. When Walt tries to Columbo his way into asking about the tracking device, Hank shuts the garage door and confronts his enemy. Walt doesn’t deny being Heisenberg, and he gets a punch in the face from Hank for his trouble. Walt’s non-defense defense is this: he’s dying. His cancer is back. Even if Hank could prove his accusations, Walt will be dead before he’d ever see the inside of a jail cell. Is Hank willing to destroy his family for that? And moreover, is Hank willing to mess with crouching-tiger Walt?
Oh, and in the bearded-Walt flash forward, his home is abandoned and boarded up, a virtual crime scene, infested with skateboarders. Walt breaks in and retrieves his secret vial of ricin. Can’t imagine how that ends well.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: Four and a half seasons of the best drama on TV, pretty much.
As was largely expected, we open the final eight episodes the same way we opened episode 5.1, in a flash-forward sequence wherein Walt has hair on his head, a full beard and is wearing an army jacket, which may very well be Jesse’s army jacket, which according to this theory is very bad news. But let’s not dwell on the future just yet. So Walt has migrated from Denny’s -- where he bought that stash of automatic weapons -- to his home. We’re greeted by an ultra-close-up of skateboarders rolling around in what we soon discover is the Whites’ dried up and abandoned pool. The whole house is abandoned, boarded up and fenced in. Very likely a crime scene. Whatever happens between this episode and the flash-forward, clearly something terrible goes down at Walt’s house.
He sneaks past the fence and breaks into his own home, which is completely emptied out. Someone has spray-painted "Heisenberg" on the living room wall, so clearly that cat gets out of the bag as well. Walt makes his way to the bedroom, and it suddenly becomes clear what he’s doing here. (It doesn’t hurt that the previouslies remind us of Walt taping the ricin capsule behind the outlet plate last season.) So Walt unscrews the plate, retrieves Chekhov’s ricin and is on his way.
Outside, he returns to the car and the trunk filled with weapons where he returns the tire iron he used to break in. Behind him, out of focus, stands his neighbor, all mild-mannered and not-quite-"elderly" and scared shitless. Quite clearly, Walter White has become quite infamous to the greater Albuquerque area. Walt turns to face her and says, "Hello, Carol." She drops her grocery bag.
Credits. Elements.
Now, back where we left things off last season, we see the camera pan steadily in on a closed door in the White bedroom. Inside is a bathroom. In that bathroom is a toilet. Atop that toilet sits Hank Schrader. And in Hank’s hands is a copy of Leaves of Grass with an inscription dedicated to "W.W." in the same handwriting as Gale Boedicher used. Hank has just, at long last, put all the pieces together. Walt -- mild-mannered, book-smart-but-not-street-smart Walt -- is the criminal mastermind Heisenberg. The great thing is that rather than finding himself fortified with righteous anger, Hank is scared out of his goddamn mind. His whole worldview has been flipped upside down. Everything he thought he knew about his brother-in-law was wrong. He’s found his white whale, and now it presents about eight million bigger problems for him.
He walks out of the bathroom, jaw literally hanging open, and staggers to the kitchen. There, he slips the book into Marie’s giant purple tote bag. After staring at Walt through a gauzy curtain for a minute, he returns to the patio (where Marie is conveniently bantering with Walt that he’s "the devil" -- probably too cute a line, let’s be honest) and declares that he’s feeling pretty queasy. He tells Marie they need to leave, and they make a hasty retreat. Like any classic horror movie, we get a jump-scare when Walt appears at Hank’s driver-side window and asks if he’s okay to drive. Of course, this whole time, Devil Walt has baby Holly in his arms, which is a great touch, not only because it visually softens Walt just as Hank is seeing what a demon he is, but also because we know how attached Hank got to Holly during his and Marie’s stewardship of the kids. Now this precious angel is the arms of a drug-dealing murderer and Hank has to just leave it at that.
(It should be noted that as the Whites file back into the house, Walt waves hello to Carol, who is watering her lawn. She’s decidedly friendlier to him in this context.)
On the ride home, Marie is slightly less yappy that you'd expect… which is still plenty yappy, let’s be clear. She’s too busy going on and on about Skyler and Walt’s propose trip to Europe to notice that Hank is gripping the wheel pretty tightly. We see his vision go blurry and for a minute there, I really worried that the show was going to have Hank stroke out, die and set us back to square one in terms of nobody being onto Walt. But while he’s not exactly stroking out, Hank does have some kind of episode. Be it a rage blackout or a panic attack or what, the bottom line is that Hank steers the car into a nearby front yard, crashing through a picket fence. He can’t seem to breathe all that easily, and Marie starts yelping for the owner of the house to call an ambulance.
Not to worry, though. thing we see, Hank and Marie have returned home to the Purple Palace after a trip to the hospital. Without a firm diagnosis, the doctors could only tell him that it was not a heart attack. He’s eager to cut off his wrist band while Marie harangues him to please take it easy. Hank just tells her she can’t tell Skyler, before taking Leaves of Grass and heading right for the garage, where he evidently keeps his Heisenberg research. He finds Gale’s chemistry notebook and compares the handwriting on both inscriptions. It is indeed the same. Hank’s suspicions confirmed, he manages to not have another panic attack.
The day, we’re at the car wash where Walt and Skyler are now working side-by-side as entrepreneurs. Despite Walt’s having laid down the life of a drug kingpin, things are still pretty frosty between him and Skyler, who kind of brushes past him on the way to work. He’s kind of overbearing as he makes "suggestions" about where to place the air fresheners and the energy drinks in the shop. He also presents Skyler with what he feels should be the natural extension of not only the car-wash business but their cover story: they should expand their franchise. Skyler seems amenable enough to it -- she’s been thinking about one particular location, in fact -- but she remains ever wary of her husband. The truth is, Walt’s already reminding us all that, meth or not, he’s still definitely in the empire business.
Walt heads inside while Skyler attends to the customer, a short, pale brunette with giant sunglasses and a jittery demeanor. Well, hello there, Lydia Rodart-Quayle. So nice to see you back. Skyler hands her a ticket, sends her inside for a complimentary beverage and wishes her an "A-1 day." Inside, Lydia approaches the counter, where Walt stares her down for a moment before snapping back into A-1 personality. Lydia, true to form, gets right to the point: quality of product is way down. Like, 67% purity, which seems like such a drastic drop that I can only assume that dumb old Todd is the one in charge of the cook. Walt simply reiterates their original deal: that he left them with a viable formula and now he’s out. Lydia simply wants him to return just this once, to give a tutorial, basically, and get them back on track. She promises it would only be a few days, a week tops. You keep waiting for Walt to backslide, if you’re of the mind that cooking meth is what Walt really wants to do. But he stands firm and brushes Lydia right off. It’s admirable of Walt, I guess, but if he’s proving that he can’t be bought back into the game, Lydia’s just going to have to find other ways to coerce him and that could be even worse news.
As Lydia skitters out, we see Skyler has not failed to notice just how intense their conversation was. She wanders over to Walt and idly wonders why a person would bother to wash her rental car. Oh, Lydia. Such an amateur at heart. Walt doesn’t even bother to lie to Skyler about it -- this new Walt really does seem to have turned a new leaf with an intention to be on the up-and-up. He tells Skyler the woman is an old business associate. "She wants me to go back. And I won’t." At this, Skyler sets her not inconsiderable jaw and stomps out into the garage. She relieves Enrique of his duty and gets Lydia’s attention. "Get out of here. Now." Lydia looks affronted, by Skyler continues to warn her to never return. "Do you understand me?" she continues. "GO." And she goes.
After the break, we’re at home with Hank and Marie. He tells her he’s not going to work today, which makes her happy because she thinks it means he’s going to take it easy. But as she leaves, we see a couple delivery people who have brought boxes and boxes of Hank’s files to be set up in the garage. Looks like work is coming to Hank. The sound of the garage door closing melds with the soundtrack ramping up, and before you know it, we’re smack in the middle of the recapper’s best friend: the montage. Hank pores through his files, photos of dead bodies, Gus Fring, Los Pollos Hermanos, greenhouses in the desert, bullet-ridden SUVs, Mike, Tio Hector, Chow, Gale. Surveillance video of the hard-drive heist. Hank is positively bug-eyed at the scope of it all, still trying to wrap his head around the idea of Walt being behind it all. Even that sketch drawing of Heisenberg, the one that now so obviously looks like Walt, seems almost like science fiction to Hank.
Cut to the house of our favorite guy, Jesse Pinkman. And as has been the case in about half of the season premieres, he looks about ready to check out permanently. This time, though, he doesn’t have the deaths of Jane or Gale hanging over his head. The kid on the dirtbike, sure, yes, but there’s been a good deal of distance between that event and now. Last we saw Jesse, he was cowering in his home, half-expecting Walt to come and kill him. But there’s something else that’s haunting him right now. Lucky for Jesse -- and for us all -- he’s got Badger and Skinny Pete there to keep him company. And Badger, in particular, is in rare form. While Jesse sits off to the side, barely existing, Pete blathers on about how the transporter beam doesn’t so much as move you but rather kills you and reassembles copies of your molecules in another place (a solid theory, really). Then, Badger regales Skinny Pete with his pitch for the best Star Trek episode of all time. There is almost no way I’m going to do this story justice -- check out this animated version of the story for the real deal -- but just know that it involves a pie-eating contest, the transporter and the most graphic inversion of a man’s gastrointestinal system since Chuck Palahniuk. It is truly a story to behold and it is Badger’s finest moment on the series for sure. Somehow, Jesse isn’t as riveted by all this as he should be and he ambles out of the house.
Cut to the waiting room at Better Call Saul, and boy is that a depressing corner of the galaxy. Hippies in neck braces. Sad single moms. Huell and his sleep apnea taking a cat nap. And Jesse, with a giant duffel bag full of cash. Clearly, Saul is taking his time with his clients, because the line hasn’t moved in a bit, and Jesse is getting restless and pissy. Finally, he just pulls out a joint and lights it up, despite the objections of Huell and Saul’s receptionist. Having looked defeat in the eye long ago, the receptionist finally buzzes Saul and tells Jesse he can go in. Inside, it’s quite clear that Saul has just finished up a massage and it’s not a huge leap to assume just what kind of massage Saul was receiving. And if assuming doesn’t do it, the masseuse tells him to zip up his fly. After some small talk that establishes that Saul hasn’t heard from Walt since the jailhouse massacre of last season, Jesse points to his twin duffel bags. $2.5 million in each of them, and he wants one to go to Kaylee Ehrmantraut and one to go to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sharp. In other words, Mike’s granddaughter and the parents of the dirt bike kid. Saul fairly reasonably points out that for the parents of a missing kid, a sack full of money won’t so much give them peace as to lead to more troubling questions. And as for Kaylee, the Feds are all over Mike, who at the moment is a high-profile fugitive from justice. They’ve taken Kaylee’s nest egg twice before, and there’s no reason to think they won’t again. Poor Saul. It’s when he’s at his most reasonable that Walt and Jesse listen to him the least. Saul very gingerly asks Jesse if he’s been in touch with Mike, but Jesse just glowers at him. He tells Saul he’ll distribute the cash himself if need be, but Saul leaps up and assures Jesse he’ll take care of it. He knows a bad situation from a worse one. And after brushing off some advice to take a nap and maybe clean up, Jesse sulks off.
Saul then goes directly to his drawer of burner phones and calls exactly who you’d expect him to call. "Don’t hang up on me!" he begs. He informs Walt of the situation with Jesse and the money, and Walt quickly says not to do anything with it. "I’ll handle it." The camera then cuts to a wider angle, where we see Walt sitting in a recliner, his arm hooked up to an IV bag full of glowy yellow liquid. to him are a few more people doing the same. Chemo sure seems like hell, but kudos for whoever shelled out for the lounges.
After the break, Jesse’s back at home, alone, lying underneath his filthy glass-top coffee table… so filthy that a roach is crawling across it. Jesse doesn’t even move. If you’re looking for rock-bottom in my book, failure to properly freak the fuck out at the sight of a cockroach will do it. I don’t even like typing the word more than twice in the same paragraph, for fear that I might Beetlejuice one into existence in my living room. Anyway, after a billion knocks at the door, Jesse finally rouses himself. It’s Walt, of course, and he’s brought the duffel bags full of cash. He’s upset about Jesse’s actions, but he’s no longer the Scary Walt of last season. He’s back to being Jesse’s exasperated teacher again. Jesse just sits back on the coach, giving Walt the bare minimum of acknowledgment. All he’ll say to Walt is, "It’s like you said… its blood money." Walt is forced to eat his own words, saying that was something he said in the heat of the moment. He tries to absolve Jesse of this guilt he’s feeling. "This is your money," he says, patting Jesse on the shoulder like an old football coach. "You earned it." Facing yet another stonewall, Walt sits down and tries to level with Jesse about Drew Sharpe, how awful that was, how neither of them can take it back. "You need to stop focusing on the darkness behind you," Walt says. "The past is the past." You get the sense Walt has said the same thing to himself recently.
He informs Jesse that he’s out of the business, which at least gets Jesse to turn his head. "There is nothing left for us to do," says Walt, "but to try to live ordinary, decent lives." None of this feels like a performance, I should note. All those times that Walt was clearly manipulating Jesse -- including this time, because Walt absolutely has an agenda here -- at the very least that desire to live a decent life feels honest. But comes Walt’s big lie. When Jesse finally starts talking, he talks about Mike. He wants to give Kaylee the money because he knows Mike isn’t coming back. He knows Mike isn’t coming back because the jailhouse murders, he figures, wouldn’t have been carried out if Mike was around to retaliate. So whoever arranged those murders -- clearly Walt -- must have known that Mike was out of the picture. Jesse figures Walt put him out of the picture. And considering how often last season’s episodes painted Jesse as the son torn between two squabbling fathers, you can imagine now why Jesse is so devastated. Dad killed Dad. Walt does an all-time best job acting aghast. He assures Jesse that what he’s saying is the truth: he didn’t kill Mike. As far as he knows, Mike is alive and well and fleeing the cops. "I need you to believe me," Walt says. He ends up saying it more than once. It clearly wounds him that Jesse would think Walt capable of this, even though, you know, he did it. But he would like to think of himself, now, as better than that, and he needs Jesse to think it of him too. He also needs Jesse on his side. Jesse ultimately says he believes Walt, but one look at his face will give you a lot of doubts.
That night, at the White house, family dinner is going as smoothly and normally as it has in many months. Only Walt is visibly feeling ill, likely from the chemo. He’s hiding this from Skyler and Flynn, which means they obviously don’t know the cancer is back. Trading one secret for another, then. He excuses himself, heads to the bathroom, and retrieves a hidden bottle of prescription pills (anti-nausea, one assumes) from below the sink. But he’s too late; barfing is imminent. So he runs the water to disguise the noise and -- taking a page from Gus Fring’s book, as many an Internet sleuth has noted -- kneeling on a folded up bath towel, Walt gets to yakking in the toilet. While down there, he takes a moment to peruse the bathroom reading and discovers that something is indeed missing.
Later that night, Skyler is getting into bed while Walt scours the bedroom for his copy of Leaves of Grass. It’s not clear whether Walt finds this cause for alarm yet or even realizes why it would be. He turns the light off and idly asks Skyler how Hank has been. She mentions a stomach bug of some kind and says he apparently hasn’t been to work all week. This seems to be what triggers Walt’s master-criminal brain. Once Skyler is asleep, he sneaks outside, seemingly unsure of what he’s even looking for. Then, it occurs to him: he heads over to his car and checks in the wheel well. There, he finds it: a police tracking device. So now it looks like both cat and mouse are keenly aware of each other.
After the break, we see a homeless guy digging through trash in the parking lot of a closed-up hot-dog stand. He spots a car in the lot and asks the guy spaced out in the front seat for some cash. It’s Jesse and he shoos the guy away, until he thinks better of it. He calls the guy back and tosses a bound-up stack of bills at the guy. With his whole duffel of millions right there, visible in the light. Lucky for Jesse, this doesn’t turn into an opportunistic murder situation. But it does give him an idea. So we cut to Jesse driving down the streets of a seriously run-down neighborhood, tossing stacks of cash out the window and onto people’s lawns. Onto the sidewalk. And, in at least one case, into an open sewer grate. Pennywise is going to be living FAT this month, I can tell you what. Jesse’s money-tosses turn desperate as he tries to get rid of this blood money faster than he can even chuck it. Not to be pessimistic, but I wonder if he realizes how much of that money is going to end up right back in the meth economy. I’m sure he doesn’t.
The day, Hank’s in his garage, having just received another delivery of boxes from his cop friends. They’re relaying the boys’ concerns about Hank’s health (with good reason; he looks ashen and unshaven and a wreck). He just tells the guys to get back to work. They’re heading off when Walter White himself rolls up. You can practically feel Hank’s entire circulatory system tense up. While Walt makes small-talk with the delivery guys, Hank tries to box up what loose papers he’s got hanging around, but he realizes there’s only so much he can cover up. He hollers for the guys to move on and pretty soon Walt is inside, with that oversized smile on his face. They make incredibly strained small-talk, Walt’s false concern meeting Hank’s poor attempts to act normal. It’s not pretty. Walt checks his watch and says he should get back to Skyler, but then pulls a Columbo and "one more thing's" Hank: it’s the tracker he found on his car last night… one that looks exactly like the tracker that he and Hank put on Gus Fring’s car, together. Hank is silent for a moment, weighs his options and then picks up the garage-door opener and clicks it. The door shuts, and it’s just the two of them. Hank and Heisenberg.
Walt asks Hank if he’s okay. "I gotta say, I don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now." Hank stares down Walt for another moment before delivering a rather hellacious roundhouse punch to Walt’s face. We’re reminded that Walt, for all his over-the top evil of the last few seasons, is not a fighter. Not in this sense. Hank definitely has the advantage over him on a regular day and that’s not considering Walt’s chemo. He’s in no condition to fight back. He grabs Walt by the back of the neck and starts going down the laundry list of crimes that Walt’s committed. Not even the crimes, really, but just the little things, like driving into traffic to keep Hank from investigating the laundry. Or getting that call to Hank to say that Marie was in trouble. The stuff that really must be gnawing at Hank because he was the closest to figuring it all out. Of course, he also gets to the part where Walt had ten witnesses killed and bombed a nursing home. Eventually, he just repeats "Heisenberg" over and over and calls Walt a piece of shit. Walt tries to defend himself, taking two parallel tracks: 1) "I don’t know what you’re talking about"; and 2) "Think of what these accusations could do to our family!" Hank says he doesn’t give a shit about angle 2, so Walt brings out the big guns: "Hank, my cancer is back." Clearly this information causes enough wires to cross in Hank’s head that he starts to tear up. This poor son of a bitch. "Rot, you son of a bitch," he says.
Walt says he’s back on chemo and fighting, but realistically speaking, he’s not going to beat this. Certainly, by the time the legal system gets through with him, he’ll be dead of the cancer before he ever sees the inside of a jail cell. Ever the pragmatist, this is Walt’s pitch to Hank: why bother? Why put everyone through hell -- he leaves unspoken the idea of what such a revelation would do to Skyler and Flynn, so we momentarily avoid the body-blow for Hank in discovering that Skyler knows. But his point remains: "I’m a dying man who runs a car wash." Why not let the cancer just take care of everything? Obviously, this plan has no concern for any ideas of justice, which is likely where the biggest disconnect lies. But Hank is so overwhelmed at this point that he can barely respond. "Get Skyler and the kids here," Hank croaks out. "And then we’ll talk." Walt says that’s never going to happen. Hank: "I don’t even know who I’m talking to." Walt: "If that’s true, if you don’t know who I am, then maybe the best course would be to tread lightly." Well. Here we are, then.
Joe R is now officially on Marie Better Not Die Watch. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.